School shootings are extraordinarily rare – Facts

Some people in the public believe that school shootings are a HUGE problem and happen with great frequency. Indeed, some school districts and legislative bodies are using the most recent shooting in Florida as a vehicle to support school bonds or introduce more gun control laws. We decided to go looking for data and ask some questions. We hope you find this information useful.

What is defined as a “mass” school shooting?

Answer: There is no definition. The media appear to use one (1) as a definition.  We first turned to Wikipedia and found this:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States   We found an article at Politifact that attempts to address this question: http://www.politifact.com/california/article/2018/feb/28/how-are-school-shootings-defined/   If we look at Wiki they show that different groups use different definitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting

Going back to 1840 in the United States and using K-12 and College how many events of five (5) or more?

• Dec 13, 1898 Charleston West Virginia: 6;
• May 6, 1940 Pasadena, CA: 5
• August 1, 1966 Austin, TX (Univ of Texas): 17
• Nov 12, 1966 Mesa, AZ (Beauty School): 5
• July 12, 1976 Fullerton, CA (CSU Fullerton): 7
• Jan 17, 1989 Stockton, CA (Elementary): 6
• Nov 1, 1991 Univ. of Iowa: 6
• Mar 24, 1998 Craighead Cnty, Arkansas (Westside Middle School): 5
• Apr 20, 1999 Collumbine HS: 15
• Mar 21, 2005 Red Lake, MN: 7 (Red Lake Senior HS)
• Oct 2, 2006 Nickel Mines, PA: 6 (West Nickel Mines School)
• Apr 16, 2007 Blacksburg, VA: 33 (Virginia Tech)
• Feb 14, 2008 DeKalb, IL: 6 (Northern Illinois Univ.)
• Apr 2, 2012 Oakland, CA: 7 (Oikos Univ)
• Dec 14, 2012 Newtown, Conn: 28 (Sandy Hook Elementary)
• June 7, 2013 Santa Monica, CA: 6 (Santa Monica College)
• Oct 1, 2016 Roseburg, OR: 10 (Umpqua CC)
• Feb 14, 2018 Parkland, FL: 17 (Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS)
• Total College: 97
• Total K-12: 90

We found an article published in the Washington Post on March 8th 2018. The full article can be read at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/school-shootings-are-extraordinarily-rare-why-is-fear-of-them-driving-policy/2018/03/08/f4ead9f2-2247-11e8-94da-ebf9d112159c_story.html?utm_term=.6ae7026db9df   We pulled some highlights out in case you don’t want to read the entire article.

• The Education Department reports that  roughly 50 million children attend public schools for roughly 180 days per year. Since Columbine, approximately 200 public school students have been shot to death while school was in session, including the recent slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. (and a shooting in Birmingham, Ala., on Wednesday that police called accidental that left one student dead). That means the statistical likelihood of any given public school student being killed by a gun, in school, on any given day since 1999 was roughly 1 in 614,000,000. And since the 1990s, shootings at schools have been getting less common.
• The chance of a child being shot and killed in a public school is extraordinarily low. Not zero — no risk is. But it’s far lower than many people assume, especially in the glare of heart-wrenching news coverage after an event like Parkland. And it’s far lower than almost any other mortality risk a kid faces, including traveling to and from school, catching a potentially deadly disease while in school or suffering a life-threatening injury playing interscholastic sports.
• Another effect of this disproportionate fear is to direct attention to the risks we’re most afraid of and away from those that actually pose the greatest threat. Far more kids are shot outside school than in one — 7,100 a year between 2012 and 2014 , or 19 every day (compared with about 60 shootings at schools each year, according to the Gun Violence Archive). More than 1,000 of them die. Fear focused on military-style “assault” rifles diverts attention from the larger issue of gun control, which has much more to do with the lethality of guns generally than with what the machine looks like.

Any death is one too many. However, jumping off the deep end and allowing ourselves to be manipulated and driven to make laws or make claims without engaging our cognitive abilities first can cause more harm. If you have questions about your local schools ask for an explanation of what they are doing. Be active participants but use reasoning skills first.